At a breakfast event at our church a few months ago, Dave Beelen recommended a book by Alan Noble, You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World.
It’s the best book I’ve read in a long time.
Here’s a summary of my notes, in bullet form.
If you are your own, then:
You must define your identity and find your own meaning.
The explanation for your existence is up to you.
There is no outside help in discerning what is right or wrong. Morality comes from within.
Your purpose is yours to determine.
The worst thing you can do is not pursue your desires, aims, goals, and ends.
The most authentic way you can live is to choose your identity.
Your are stuck between your inward-focused desire to find yourself and the outward-focused need to find justification by others.
But you are not your own, so:
You belong, body and soul, to someone else, to God, to others.
Your belonging carries risk—of being taken advantage of, of being used, of being hurt and hurting others.
You can be yourself, but your value doesn’t come from you.
You have duties, limits, and obligations to yourself and others.
You can take comfort in the constraints on your life.
The meaning in your life is objective, external, and real.
And this:
“For myself, the greatest comfort in belonging to Christ is that the things most central to my experience of life find their home. Love, beauty, justice, joy, guilt, pleasure, longing, sorrow, delight—it is these things, not in the abstract but in particular moments and with particular people, that give life most of its grandeur. I know I can find alternate frameworks to explain the love I feel toward my wife or the pleasure I experience reading a great novel or the righteous indignation that fills me when I witness injustice. But none of those accounts can avoid impoverishing the very things I find most true about life. In Christ I take comfort that the truest things in life are real things.”
Finally, a programming note: I’m traveling next week, so the next email will hit your inbox on Monday, June 3.
Thanks for reading,
Kent